Music Pals Hope MacColl's Voice not Forgotten

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Her salon in a London flat played host to some of British pop music's leading stars -- U2, The Smiths, Billy Bragg -- and her voice provided backing vocals to many of their hit recordings.

Now many of that cadre of musicians hope that the last recording made by English pop singer Kirsty MacColl before her death at age 41 will spark a renewed interest and appreciation in her music.

After she died in December 2000 in a boating accident in Mexico, MacColl was recalled by obituary writers as running pop music's version of the Algonquin round table, a reference to the New York hotel where some of the leading wits of the 1930s and 40s gathered to discuss their writing.

Some of the members of MacColl's round table worked with her in the recording studio or on stage and many circulated in gatherings at her London apartment. Many of these musicians would be found at MacColl's London flat, which was equipped with a recording studio.

"She had a studio in her house. When you went to a party, there would always be someone doing something," Bragg told Reuters recently, adding that guests often would arrive to find her and a fellow musician teaming up on a song.

Before her death, MacColl recorded Tropical Brainstorm, an album featuring Latin rhythms and released last year. But, the love of Cuban and Latin music seems a long way from MacColl's first turn to music.

The daughter of British folk musician Ewan MacColl, who penned Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Kirsty began her recording career in her late teens when she wrote and released They Don't Know. Later, comedienne Tracey Ullman would record the song and it became a hit.

MacColl's first musical outing was a punk band, The Drug Addix, in 1978, when she was 18. She later collaborated with many of England's New Wave acts, and worked with Bragg, The Pogues and The Smiths.

Bragg, a singer and songwriter who has recorded over the last two decades, wrote one of MacColl's first hit songs in 1983, A New England.

The two singers first became aware of each other's work in the early 1980s, a period in English pop music when the punk and New Wave styles flourished and independent record labels, like MacColl's first label, Stiff Records, blossomed. Musicians at the time sang of self-deprecating love or working-class woes and their records were snapped up.

Originally a love song written from a man's perspective, Bragg tailored A New England for a woman.

"She suggested I come around to her house to change the gender of the song for her," Bragg said. "She cooked me a breakfast -- eggs and bacon and baked beans -- and I changed the gender and wrote another verse for it."

MacColl later recorded the song and had it produced by her former husband, Steve Lillywhite. The song was a hit on English music charts in 1984 and became a favourite on U.S. college radio stations.

"When the single was released, it went to the Top Ten UK and raised my profile incredibly," Bragg said.

MacColl travelled to Cuba and Brazil to survey the musical landscape before recording Tropical Brainstorm. Often this Latin and Brazilian music would be blaring aloud in MacColl's home. "She really fell in love with Latin America. She found something in Cuba that was sadly missing in the damp climes of England," he said.

The light rhythms of Brazilian jazz and Cuban flavour show throughout Tropical Brainstorm.

MacColl's musician friends remember her sharp wit, and some of that humour shows on her last album in songs like England 2, Colombia 0, where she draws parallels between a drunken pub courtship and a soccer match.

In the song, MacColl's single female protagonist unknowingly courts a married man. "It was a kind of Bridget Jones moment, offering raw honesty from Kirsty," Bragg said, referring to the best-selling fiction book that chronicles the a single woman's experiences dating.

Had MacColl been alive to proceed with a new recording it likely would have slipped away from the Latin and Cuban music styles, according to David Ruffy, MacColl's drummer.

"She wasn't going to do an out-and-out Latin thing. It was (to be) a kind of hybrid. A swing, ska sound. She was in great form and her wit was really sharp. It would have been fun."

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Music Pals Hope MacColl's Voice not Forgotten

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